Have you seen that infographic slamming milk and dairy that’s floating around facebook? You didn’t think I would let that go by did you? This is what happens when you have a ticked off dairy farmer with a smart phone! I hope you’ll share this and help get the dairy facts out there!

Super special thanks to my friend Jenny who helped me put this together (And is responsible for making my blog look awesome!) Check out her blog by clicking HERE.

51 thoughts on “Got Milk? Milk Myth Busting – INFOGRAPHIC”

Hi Carrie~love your blogs! My husband is a veterinarian and grew up on a dairy farm, has always said “milk is natures most perfect food”! Thanks for all your awesome info on agriculture issues~people need to be informed!

Good post. And don’t forget the whey! I turn 1-2 gallons of milk into cheese for my own use every week and I use the whey in all sorts of things from baking to pancakes (whey makes the most awesome pancakes in the universe) and I use it instead of water for making soup. Milk’s good for all sorts of things.

I was lactose intolerant when I was a child (I grew out of it), but they make a OTC medication, Lactaid, that tastes like ice cream and helps you digest lactose without the negative side effects! So growing up eating dairy wasn’t a problem!

Thanks for busting those myths! Your letter to WP is terrific. It’s amazing how so many people can get it all wrong, and follow such a snake oil salesman like Wayne. No one is forcing anyone to consume dairy products, yet HSUS feels entitled to push a vegan lifestyle on everyone – if they can’t convince you on merit, they make laws that interfere with human and animal relationships. Our diet is our business, but it’s vitally important that we have all the facts before we jump on a trend – one that could kill us, or at least make our lives unhappy and unhealthy. I wonder when Wayne thinks is the right age to take milk away from babies and children . . . of course HE doesn’t plan on having any, because he loathes the human race. Doesn’t like animals, either, what a miserable existence, outside of the circle of life.

Go gett’em…I totally agree with you! I grew up on a Jersey farm. I love milk and dairy products. I can’t drink milk but I sure can eat cheese and I eat a lot of it!! I also use real butter. I sent my husband to the store for butter (He’s a city boy), he came home with margarine. I gagged and threw it in the trash and went and bought some real butter…He knows better now and it only took 10 years, lol…

Actually, a human baby’s optimal first meal is colostrum from a human mother, not any form of cow’s milk. That sentiment alone negates the validity of anything else in this graphic, in my opinion. Human milk and cow’s milk are wildly different which is why cow’s milk cannot be used as a human milk substitute–it is nutritionally deficient in comparison. Using the statement, “Milk is our first meal” to promote dairy is ignorant at best.

Yes, it is milk, but it is not cow’s milk. It is human milk, specifically formulated for the baby consuming it. Research supports the fact that human milk is the optimal food for babies under a year and delineatesthe differences among human milk and its substitutes, including cow’s milk.

If this is your response to a “misleading” infographic against milk, you are doing no better using blatantly misleading statements like this. THAT is why it calls the validity of your other claims into question.

Don’t worry Carrie, I found the humor. This whole thing was hilarious. A sure sign of rising anxieties among the meat/dairy/egg industries that producers are fearing people learning the truth about these industries and how unnecessary these items are for our diets.

FYI, I am sure many people, like myself, saw the comment as having nothing whatsoever to do with a position on breastfeeding but instead a cute way of saying we all start with “milk”, in one form or another. There are just some people who look for reasons to criticize or pick a fight. Carry on, Dairy Carrie!

My parents were very poor when I was a baby, my mother could not breast feed, so after six months on formula, not being able to afford it any longer she used cows milk, and pasturized on her own, I was fed this back in 1966. I am just letting you all know, the first time I ever had my blood drawn was when I was 32, my first pregnancy, this is definitely not recommended, I did not do this with my kids, but out of all five of us kids in my family, we are all very healthy and I am by far the healthiest. Something to be said about this.

I like this, Carrie, but as a nurse and mom who has breastfed two babies I would recommend that “Milk is our first meal” is misleading as your infographic is about cow’s milk, not human milk. I appreciate all you do for ag, but just putting in my two sense as a mom who is also a farmer’s wife. I would love to see your sources/references at the bottom of the post too – I trust you, but would love to read more into things.

So is the other graphic anti-breastfeeding? I’m just confused, trust me I’m 100% pro-breastfeeding, but I didn’t see that this info was about “all” milk and not just cow’s milk – coming from a dairy farmer’s blog 😉

No, and my post isn’t meant to be anti breast feeding either. I think some folks are taking what I intended to say in a very different direction. The intent was to address the “milk is unnatural” statement. The other infographic didn’t differentiate between cow’s milk or breast milk either.

Oh just for your statistics, especially the lactose intolerant one! I always love learning more about agriculture, especially now that there’s an anti-milk infographic going around. I wonder where they got all their ‘info’ from?

Were do they get that milk goes from the cow to the cart in 48 hours? That is so wrong, I use to dairy and I do under stand but I still farm and drive milk truck. Most of my farm are on every other day pickup (like 35 out of 42 farms) and sometimes the milk that I pick up will go to the cheese factory and gets reloaded on to another truck and goes to another plant to be bottled. So by the time from cow to cart could be as long as 5 days, and milk from central Wis is being bottled in northern Ill. Years ago there were more dairies that would bottle milk and would stay local, but today over half of the bottling plants are gone and have no choice but ship there product long distances to fill the consumers needs!

“They” would be me. The milk from our farm goes from the cow to the milk plant in the same day. It’s bottled and shipped the next day. Not all milk moves that fast but it moves much more quickly than most people would think.

Most farms here in central wis are picked up every other day , do to the volume premiums offered by the CO OP’S and private processors, (most of my stops have 1000 gal or larger bulk tanks). Also most processors keep a 48-72 hour inventory in the coolers like Deans in Huntley or Chemung Ill or Kemps in Cedaburg Wis.I know that most producers are picked up every day in the southern part of the state.( I hauled in that area for years in the 80′s +90″s) For some reason the processors down in the southern part of the state don’t like to shell out extra for that volume premium.

Hi, I used to drive milk truck. The milk I picked often most times would be pasteurized and made into cheese the same day. Of course it had to age so it was in the cooler for a while. It’s very possible for next day to same day turn around time.

I know that it is possible for a turn around time in 48 hours for SMALL dairies, to take in raw milk and process it and load it out for resale. But here in the mid-west I can think of more than 12 bottling plants that are no longer in business (went out in the last 10 or so years). This put a larger burden on the ones that remain. And do to the dairies further apart it takes longer for the finished product to reach the store shelves or coolers. Most bottling plants DON’T distribute there products, it’s redistributed by another company, so the finished product goes from the plant to another cooler/warehouse, Were loads are picked from there inventory then delivered to Schools and Stores. Also most bottling plants in the Mid- West do not procure milk (they don’t have their own farms to purchase milk from to full fill there needs) , they purchase milk from co op’s and private dairies, and have it delivered to them to full fill there needs, and the purchasing plant DOES NOT CARE how far or were the milk comes from! Does anyone realize how far milk travels? There is govt kickbacks for buying and selling milk. That’s why trucking Co’s like Loal C Hagen, JLP , Caledonia Haulers, Ottery Transit and the list goes on and on. Are hauling milk plant to plant, and just because the milk was bottled at Waukesha, Wis that does not mean it is local Milk. Depending on what time of year it is there is milk coming from Florida up to the mid-west for processing, or other times of the year it is coming from the mid-west and going to Florida. I could go on and on about this, but I hope you get the picture? I was a driver that hauled from plant to plant all over the mid-west in the late 80’s and through the 90’s so I saw this STUFF first hand!

I’m a Missouri dairy farmer, and our milk is bottled within 48 hours. It gets picked up within 24 hours, one hour later it’s at the bottling plant, 46.1 miles down the road. We provide for a sizable portion of Kansas City’s liquid milk consumption.

I am so glad that you are out there letting everyone know about farming Carrie, I farm too, I think it’s so very sad we have to defend ourselves for making food. It is the sign of the times. But that could change with articles I’ve read about our world population and all the natural disasters happening around not only America. I think people don’t know how blest we are and how if we didn’t use the methods we use in farming today, there would not be enough food. Thank you Carrie, keep up the great informative work.

This is one of the most ridiculous and embarrassing pieces of “journalism” I’ve seen.

People have already called into your question your “first meal” reference, which has no humor or sarcasm attached so to pitch it off that way is silly.

Secondly, you blatantly point out into the open how cows can produce more milk than they used to? How is this, in any way, a good thing? Even if you could careless about the humane aspect of filling cows with hormones and steroids to produce more milk, and injecting them with semen over and over again, what about the fact that it’s just downright unnatural? Not all progress is actually progress Carrie.

Defend your way of life all you want, but don’t lie and mislead people. Dairy is the last nutrient anyone on this planet needs and is the first thing they should give up if they want to live a healthier more fulfilling life.

For starters, I applaud you for announcing at the very beginning that you are a dairy farmer – but that obviously means you have a vested interest in the “information” you provide being accepted as the truth.
As many others have pointed out your comment about milk being our first drink and therefore it’s only natural is ridiculous at best. Well look at nature… we are the ONLY creatures on the face of the earth who drink milk past weaning. Other creatures will – such as cats – but that is when there is a human providing it to them. It is completely natural to drink milk as an infant, it is not completely natural to drink milk past weaning nor to drink the milk of another creature.
As a side note to this – this is why adults are lactose intolerant – our bodies stop producing the enzyme required to breakdown lactose because our bodies were not created to have lactose past weaning. Before you ask, the statistics on lactose intolerant merely point to the people who report their gastro-intestinal distress and get a diagnosis, others know enough to avoid dairy products that cause distress without actually getting a diagnosis. Many others just put up with it, some don’t realize that it’s not normal and some don’t understand it comes from milk.
The article you are attempting to debunk also failed to mention how there would be much better matches to human milk than cows. The number of and types of enzymes in cows is vastly different than human milk. Goats are a much better alternative, but goat farmers didn’t put the same kind of money into marketing that the dairy boards have (not to mention the gov’t lobbying – note Canada’s food guide, supported by our gov’t and provided/taught in schools is prepared by the Dairy Board).
Lastly – the most glaring omission to your debunking failed to even mention the scariest fact out of all of the reasons to not drink milk. The IGF-1 being given to cows to increase your productivity (which you attribute to “taking better care” of your cows)has already been documented to have all kinds of repercussions in humans and I think we will continue to find that situation will only get worse as we learn more and more about messing with the way nature works. In my opinion, the addition of IGF-1 is no better (and perhaps worse) than GMO’s.
I get that your livelihood requires people to consume dairy products, but the next time you want to make a claim of providing “truthful” information, you should actually deal in the truth.

Would you mind if I possibly used this info graphic at a regional fair and livestock show? I have a project where I’m trying to educate urban youth and people in general and I thought this hit on a few good points.